by Keith Johnson
Biz-Sites, Inc.

Marketing is the process by which you attempt to drive your target market to your selling zone (web site). It does not consist of having every Internet surfer visit your web site.

Some of the ways you can advertise are...

Placing ads in newsletters
Linking with other sites
Purchasing key words on GoTo.com
Registering with the search engines
Placing ads in newsletters is one of the most effective ways to get your message out. It is not the number of subscribers but their interests that you should look for. If you can find a newsletter that your target market reads your results will be better than a newsletter with a huge subscriber base but without your target market.

Always track your results. You need to determine if the profit from the new sales generated is greater than the cost of the advertisement. If so you have found a winner. If not examine what went wrong and try again.

Asking other web sites to link to your web site is another way to increase your traffic. Make sure you have valuable content to offer. Then send a personal email to the owner of the site, compliment them on a specific area you like. Tell them you have information that would be beneficial to their visitors and ask them to link to your web site.

I was once asked to link to a site that contained nothing but pages of banner ads. I responded that I didn't see anything new or worthy of a link to them. Most people hate banner ads especially pages after page of them so there wasn't anything to gain. It wasn't a valuable resource. Keep that in mind so you don't go wasting your time or theirs.

You can purchase keywords on the GoTo.com search engine. How high you rank in their search engine listing depends on the size of your bid. If someone clicks on your link the amount of the bid is subtracted from your account.

I have used this for a client and received good results. We bid $0.50 (fifty cents) for our keyword and were in the top ten places. We also went through a $250.00 account balance in three months. But they picked up many new clients.

Finally you can register with the search engines. You should do this anyway. You should also optimize your site for a good search engine placement. Just don't count on making a fortune from the search engines. You need to do more than this and that is why I placed it last.

Two years ago I had a number 1 placement in a number of search engines under the keywords 'merchant programs'. I received a few extra inquiries a week but I certainly could not make a living off of the leads, let alone an above average living.

Getting traffic from the search engines is nice but by all means do something else. Once you clear the mind set of getting a good search engine placement and start marketing in other ways is when you will start seeing some results.

Marketing is everything.
Marketing is time consuming.
Marketing should never stop.
Paste those words to your computer and live by them.

Keith R. Johnson
Biz-Sites, Inc.
http://www.biz-sites.com